Matt Prior
Last week, Lotus announced a new programme called Chapman Bespoke. It promises to offer greater personalisation and unique options, right up to the production of one-off cars, for your Lotus.
What would Colin Chapman, Lotus’s founder, after whom the scheme is named and whose signature adorns its badge, have thought?
No idea. Never met the bloke. One of my least favourite phrases in motoring hackery is “so and so [company founder] would have approved”. It’s usually proclaimed definitively at the end of an article to show that a car is a true thoroughbred, that it’s fit to wear the name. But honestly, how are we to know what WO Bentley or Charles Rolls would seriously have thought about the cars that come out of their companies’ respective factories today? Big cliché. Silly phrase. I’ve vowed never to use it so, aside from the occasions where I probably already have, never will.
Anyway, famously, Chapman said things about simplifying cars and adding lightness, which is certainly something he did on cars made for and derived from racing, like the Lotus (now Caterham) 7, and which was a path followed by the Lotus Elise after his death. And given that he sketched out his first cars by hand and built them much the same way, Lotus thinks he would have been into this Bespoke idea.
Chapman was also partial, like most entrepreneurs, to making a few quid. Allowing somebody to paint their Lotus the same colour as their favourite nail polish and finishing the interior with gazelle hide if they’re prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege (Bentley makes an average of £34,000 per car from its Mulliner programme) sounds like the sort of thing that he might have been absolutely fine with too.
As I’ve already established, I wouldn’t dare say whether Chapman would have ‘approved’ or not, but if it makes Lotuses more desirable, and particularly if somebody has an idea for a dreamy new lightweight one-off supercar for us to drool over, it sounds all right to me.
It suggested that we get serious about cleaning it up. Any campaign to get that done would receive my support, too. But I don’t know that we should feel quite so much shame about
